The Road to Serfdom by F. Hayek

I finally got around to reading The Road to Serfdom. Yes, it is worthwhile reading.

He undertakes to show how any attempt to redesign a society along centrally planned lines, as every version of socialism (National Socialist or Facist or International Socialist or Democratic Socialist) tries to do, will, by the logic of planning and the limits of the human mind, tend inevitably to try control not "merely economic things" but by extension every aspect of life, control information, and revise the meaning of words. And so it has proved. For a simple example, those enamored of centralized re-education have spent the effort to try to redefine words like "racism" and "free speech" to try to eliminate contrary positions without debate.

The book draws more heavily from German examples than Soviet ones, because it was written during WWII, when the USSR was an ally which nobody wanted to antagonize, but for every German example you can easily find plenty of Soviet counterparts. It draws heavily on British politicians and thinkers because it was meant for publication on the other side of the pond.

One aspect of society which Hayek does not mention is religion, possibly because he did not understand it well. The commonalities are obvious, though. God can demand anything of us, and so can the totalitarian state. However, pastors and bishops are obviously not omniscient, so in practice we tend not to experience such thorough guidance. Only God has the intellect to manage billions of human lives with individual attention and love. Human planners have to think in terms of faceless lumps--and not think very well, either. But because the divinity in a planned state is vested in human constructs, there's no vast gap between the god and the representatives, and they can and do demand compliance with more and more intrusive rules. "Who died and made you God?" is answered by "The Plan/Party/People is God and I am part of it."

Another aspect he did not foresee, though others did notice it, is that as liberty is further and further restricted, people would be thrown the bone of "sexual liberation."

The Reader's Digest produced a condensed version of the book when it first came out--and I can easily see how it could have been condensed. His style is a bit wordy.

And, FWIW, he is not averse to things like a guaranteed minimum provision for citizens if the nation is wealthy enough, but is alive to the extreme problems of how to define the minimum and what happens at the border between states, one of which has a larger minimum provision than the other.